Predictions for 2014

We will witness largest number of migrations away from Drupal ever ..

.. to NEWER VERSIONS OF DRUPAL !!

Drupal 8 is Coming Soon!

:-)

I've got a strong suspicion that, after three years of development, we'll finally see a 1.0 release of Metatag for Drupal 7.

*cough*

With the inclusion of [essentially] the services module into core, more and more companies will choose Drupal 8 for the backbone of their apps. I wrote a short prediction of Drupal 8 in our company blog at Command Partners.

In short, Drupal 8 will dominate!

In 2014 will see the largest adoption of Drupal by enterprises to date

Drupal 8 will cause some outside developers who have eschewed PHP for the past five or so years to do a double-take and reconsider their vitriolic criticism of PHP.

Reflect on the last decade? Oh my. How do you summarize in a comment what has been a paradigm shift in the worldwide web?

• Drupal changed my life, and changed the lives of countless others.
• Drupal changed what was possible in business by opening doors that were closed before.
• Drupal provided a safe and secure platform for non-profits to build their communities without spending precious budget dollars on software licensing fees.
• Drupal possibly saved publishing by providing a flexible, extensible, affordable bridge from their old infrastructures to where we are today.
• Drupal has helped professionalize open source software itself (along with a handful of other robust FOSS platforms and frameworks).
• Drupal has proved (despite some hiccups and minor arguments along the way) to be something of a model community in terms of diversity, gender equality, codes of conduct, and embracing new members.
• Drupal has crossed from awkward teen years into the beginnings of adulthood in terms of internal processes, community standards, and expectations we have regarding our own home on *.d.o.

My sense is that in 2014, with Drupal 8, we will see a shift towards more enterprise-level sites. Existing smaller sites, on the other hand, will stick it out on what they have, and perhaps drift away to other platforms, leery of the increased complexity of Drupal development and system requirements. And new smaller sites launching may shy away from Drupal more, due to this same complexity.

And yet, my sense is that as things stabilize, the migrate path gets all the kinks worked out (with extensions to handle more edge cases), and community support for nifty new modules expands, those trends may reverse. Because once the site is up, fully built out, and themed, D8 is a superior CMS.

I also predict we'll see more instances of Drupal being used purely for content processing without a public web presence, using services.

• Drupal 8 will rule.

• We will see many experienced developer starting with Drupal due to Symfony.

• Some developer will struggle for a bit after D8 launch.

• Web will be flooded with blogs about D8.

• And many more..

During 2013 there were 292049 nids created on d.o between the "Predictions"-posts.

The years 2013 (482020), 2012 (370244), 2011 (357244) and 2010 (315315) had even more nodes created in-between the prediction posts. For me it seems this numbers correlate with Drupal 7's development cycle. I'm curious about the number in 2015...

My prediction is the nids created on d.o during 2014 will be more than 292049. :)

What do you think?

Same prediction as last year: no Drupal 8 in 2014.

Alpha releases keep coming out. Critical issues get fixed at the rate of 10 per week, but new ones get raised at the rate of 8 per week. Another 6 alpha releases come and go.

Eventually, Dries and core team chop out major functionality out in order to make things progress, but only in mid 2014 do we see the first Beta release.

Way too many bugs, and serious performance issues stop any real chance of a release candidate.

7 beta releases follow.

Finally, in December 2014, a release candidate appears, but far it's too late for Drupal 8 in 2014.

Maybe in 2015.

If we are making predictions, or estimations based on past performance, Drupal will continue its focus on development rather than usage. As such, Drupal will maintain its lead among developers, while competing platforms further advance usability among publishers. If this thread was based on hope, my prediction would be that Drupal become easier for small publishers to use without the need for developers. Then, again, if the Internet "plumbing" suddenly so easy the user could do it, Drupal would put all of the "plumbers" out of business.

Very glad to know that Drupal 8 is coming. Eagerly waiting for this. My coffee will give me more energy with Drupal .. ;)

We will see the biggest loss AND the gain of community members due to big changes. It will be painful, but it will be worth it.

Everybody only sees how the big enterprises talk Drupal. That's good! Freelancing 6 years by now, I know there are tons of people who likes Drupal as well but can't afford the higher budget that goes into each project because of the upfront complexity / assumptions you need to deal with before anything happens. Tons of work / efforts were put into increasing DX, a tiny bit UX as well, though still far away from easy for newbies.

We are trying to make Drupal 8 getting easier, prettier, lighter with affordable out-of-the-box packages readily hosted to the cloud with few clicks. This would eat away a big portion of the CMS cake where Drupal is still far behind WP and J!.

Our attempt to make that happen: http://themeski.com and our focus is going to be D8. Hope we can boost the newbie / small business adoption into Drupal.

Drupal 8 will rule in 2015.